1 – Introduction

I took the time for updating the OpenGL Geometry Instancing demo pack updated I released more than 2 years ago on my infamous lab. The first version of the demo pack
has been developed and tested with a GeForce 8800 GTX and a Radeon HD 3870 and only the 8800 GTX had the HW GI (HardWare Geometry Instancing) support that why the demos didn’t start if the card was not a 8800 GTX…

Today, all recent NVIDIA and AMD graphics cards support the HW GI so a serious update of the pack was necessary. It’s done. And of course it’s not a simple recompilation with the 8800 GTX test in less, the demos have been updated with many more polygons and a new GI technique based on uniform buffer. And this time, all GI techniques work with GeForce and Radeon. Thanks to NV and ATI drivers teams!

FWIW, note that with more triangles, you’ll be hitting harder the triangle setup bottleneck of one triangle per clock cycle. Don’t know for the NVidia GTX 480, but this limit applies for the ATI R5xxx ; I don’t think that going beyond 180M triangles will bring you anything good for this generation of boards.

Nice summary of instanciation techniques and perfs though. Did you try to have finer grained timings with ARB_timer_query extension ?

Yes keep these demo and tutorials coming. I enjoy reading them as it keeps me up to date on the newest features I can do with OpenGL. Plus it’s nice to see the old vs. new method of doing the same thing so once can make his own decision on what to do.

I tested with a Radeon HD 2400, Catalyst 10.6.
The F6 technique half-failed: the asteroids are there, rotating, but all shading on them is turned off (all black). But the middle planet is shaded.
I suppose this was not intended.
The driver exposes all the 3 required extensions.